Written and edited by Norm Scott:
EDUCATE! ORGANIZE!! MOBILIZE!!!
Three pillars of The Resistance – providing information on current ed issues, organizing activities around fighting for public education in NYC and beyond and exposing the motives behind the education deformers. We link up with bands of resisters. Nothing will change unless WE ALL GET INVOLVED IN THE STRUGGLE!

Tuesday, July 4, 2017

The Democratic Party’s Deadly Dead-End – Consortiumnews

Nicholas J S Davies: In 2002, when Margaret Thatcher was asked to name her “greatest
political achievement,” she smiled her best
cat-that-swallowed-the-canary smile and purred, “Tony Blair and New Labour.” The true measure of the Reagan-Thatcher counterrevolution was not how
Reagan and Thatcher changed their own parties’ policies but that they
remade their opposition in their own image and thus marginalized
progressive politics for a generation in both their countries, clearing
the way for the neoliberal transformation of society....

The real danger of the Ossoff fiasco is the same one the corporate
Democrats keep creating and recreating for their party, that their
slick, deceptive brand of politics is so tainting their identity that it
will undermine real progressive Democratic candidates in 2018 and
beyond. After a generation of corporate politics, it is vital that both
journalists and the public learn to tell the difference between corrupt
corporate Republicans and Democrats on the one hand and genuine,
well-motivated grassroots candidates on the other.

Thanks to Michael Fiorillo for the torrent of articles on the Democratic Party. This one is a doozy. Long but worth reading in depth.

July 3, 2017 Exclusive: By playing for centrist and
neoconservative votes, national Democrats have left the party
floundering with no coherent political message and creating a daunting
challenge for democracy, says Nicolas J S Davies.

By Nicolas J S Davies
The most encouraging trend in the otherwise bleak landscape of Western politics is the success of the “new kind of politics”
unveiled by Bernie Sanders in the U.S., Jeremy Corbyn in the U.K., and
parallel movements, parties and candidates in other countries.

Sen. Bernie Sanders speaking to one of his large crowds of supporters. (Photo credit: Sanders campaign)

In their recent campaigns, Sanders and Corbyn laid
out specific progressive policies to address the real-life problems
facing their constituents and their countries and to raise taxes on the
wealthy and corporations to fully fund healthcare, education and
other vital public services. This represents a dramatic U-turn from the
vague, deceptive talking points of “center-left” Democratic, Labour and
Socialist politicians of the past generation, under cover of which
they quietly sold out their constituents to corporate, plutocratic and
military-industrial interests.

In 2002, when Margaret Thatcher was asked to name her “greatest
political achievement,” she smiled her best
cat-that-swallowed-the-canary smile and purred, “Tony Blair and New Labour.”
The true measure of the Reagan-Thatcher counterrevolution was not how
Reagan and Thatcher changed their own parties’ policies but that they
remade their opposition in their own image and thus marginalized
progressive politics for a generation in both their countries, clearing
the way for the neoliberal transformation of society.
Reagan and Thatcher launched a race to the bottom that politicians in
France, Germany, Japan and the rest of the developed world soon joined
in with. They slashed taxes on the wealthy and corporations, cut funding
for everything but weapons, war and debt, privatized public services,
and abandoned the principle that the wealth and power of wealthy
countries should benefit all their people.
Western experts also fanned out across Eastern Europe to impose neoliberal “shock therapy” that caused soaring unemployment and shocking declines in living standards and life expectancy.

The DLC: the U.S.’s New Labour
The corporate-funded Democratic Leadership Council (DLC),
which took over the leadership of the Democratic Party between the 1988
and 1992 elections, was the U.S. equivalent of Blair’s New Labour in
the U.K. But unlike New Labour, the DLC downplayed its takeover of the
Democratic Party instead of dressing it up in a splashy rebranding
campaign.

Lax campaign finance laws already left the U.S. political system wide open to corruption, or “legalized bribery”
as former President Jimmy Carter has called it, through lavish
fundraising, political advertising and corporate lobbying. The DLC
Democrats launched a campaign to match the Republicans in fundraising
from the wealthy and corporations, and “Slick Willie” Clinton sold the
DLC’s new model of “center-left” corporate politics to the public,
veiling the radical nature of his plutocratic agenda behind talking
points drafted by corporate-funded think tanks and spin doctors.
It has tragically taken three decades for a majority of Americans to
wake up to this plutocratic corporate buyout of their political system,
first by Reagan’s Republicans, but then, decisively, by the Democrats
who dropped the other shoe and left the public at large effectively
unrepresented and marginalized.

Hillary Clinton’s dramatic 2016 defeat by one of the most unpopular
figures in U.S. political history should have been a clarion call to the
middle management of the Democratic Party — members of Congress, senior
Congressional staff, and local and state party leaders — that the DLC
model of politics had run its course.

Nobody in the Democratic Party more explicitly symbolized the corrupt
DLC political model than the Clintons. Bill Clinton was the DLC’s
fourth chairman from 1990 to 1991, and his election as President in 1992
cemented the DLC’s control of the Democratic Party. The first six
chairmen of the DLC were all Southern men in the Clinton mold, and the
DLC was never chaired by a woman in its 26-year history. (The DLC closed
its doors in 2011.)
But Hillary Clinton’s defeat was hardly the first signal that the
DLC Democrats had had their day. Corporate Democrats suffered a
bloodbath in the 2010 midterm election. Even as the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) enjoyed a net gain of four seats in the House in 2010, 36 percent of non-CPC Democrats were tossed out on their ears, losing 67 of their 185 seats.
The CPC was founded in 1991 by Sen. Bernie Sanders and five
progressive Democrats, and it has grown to be the largest Democratic
caucus in Congress, with 73 current House members representing the
progressive wing of the Democratic Party.
If the 2010 election should have woken the Democrats from their complacency, the public disillusionment revealed by record low turnout
in the 2014 mid-term should have rung the alarm bells off the wall. As
Bernie Sanders repeated in almost every stump speech in 2016, “When
voter turnout is high, Democrats and progressives win. When voter
turnout is low and people are demoralized, Republicans win.”
And yet the overwhelming majority of Democratic members of Congress,
including most members of the Progressive Caucus, still backed Clinton
over Sanders in the 2016 presidential primary. Despite repeated and
increasingly dire warnings, culminating in political suicide in 2016,
the Democratic Party still refuses to repudiate or reform its failed,
corrupt DLC model of politics.
Like other aspects of neoliberalism, the Reagan-DLC model is
so entrenched and so successfully insulated the political class from
accountability to the public that they just can’t believe the game is
up.
After the election, Progressive Caucus co-chair Keith Ellison ran for
the chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), on a platform to
reform the party and restore integrity to the DNC, which flagrantly pulled strings for Clinton in the 2016 Democratic primary. But right-wing Democrats led by Haim Saban opened their wallets for an ugly campaign to smear Ellison, the first Muslim in Congress
as an anti-Semite and dig up the votes to defeat him. When Saban and
Company’s new DNC chair Tom Perez joined Bernie Sanders on a so-called
“Democratic Unity” tour, he was booed from Maine to Miami.
As Claire Sandberg, Sanders’ former digital organizing director told Vice News,
“The (Democratic Party) Establishment is like a doomsday cult; no
matter how thoroughly their predictions (are) refuted by reality, they
just dig in deeper in their incoherent worldview, with devastating
consequences for the rest of us.”

Jon Ossoff v. Harry Truman
The latest Democratic fiasco is Jon Ossoff’s defeat by a 3.8 percent
margin by Karen Handel in a special election in Georgia, despite
spending $30 million on a campaign that broke the record for legalized
bribery in a U.S. House race. To add insult to injury, Karen Handel is
the former vice president of the Susan Komen Foundation who resigned
over its support for Planned Parenthood in 2012. How much more
self-inflicted humiliation can the Democrats stand?

Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of Great Britain’s Labour Party.

On the same day, fellow Democrat Archie Parnell did
a bit better than Ossoff, losing to Republican Ralph Norman by a margin
of only 3.2 percent in an equally Republican-leaning district in South
Carolina, despite only spending $500,000 and being all but ignored by
national Democratic Party power brokers and fundraisers.
Could a share of the millions fruitlessly lavished on Ossoff have put
Parnell over the top? We’ll never know. Or is the corporate Democratic
Party machine now so toxic that its coolness to Parnell actually helped
his candidacy?
If that is the case, it raises questions about the very purpose and
existence of the Democratic Party. Could the Dems be doomed to go the
way of PASOK in Greece or the Socialists in France, former ruling
parties suddenly reduced to single digits by recent elections? Is that
what it would take to revitalize U.S. politics? Should Sanders and
progressives inside and outside the Democratic Party start a new
People’s Party, as “Draft Bernie” activists at the recent People’s Summit in Chicago were calling for?
While Ossoff was a well-connected former Congressional staffer, a
young celebrity candidate hyped by party leaders, Parnell was a
self-deprecating retired tax attorney who ran as his own man, staking
out straightforward policy positions that appeared to reflect his own
judgments of what was important to his neighbors in South Carolina, not
the calculations of career political consultants.
Parnell is a former Goldman Sachs executive, not a Sanders- or
Corbyn-style democratic socialist, but he followed Sanders and Corbyn’s
model of politics in the sense that he responded to the concerns of
working- and middle-class voters in his district and vowed to take on
powerful corporate interests.
The first issue on the “Issues” page of Parnell’s website
was “Taxes and Big Corporations.” He promised to, “use his decades of
experience and detailed knowledge of the tax code to make big
corporations pay their fair share. He knows how to close the loopholes
that allow big companies to stash trillions of dollars overseas (Parnell
worked for Goldman Sachs in Hong Kong), and will use that revenue to
strengthen our infrastructure and create jobs here at home.”
By contrast, the “Priorities” page
of Ossoff’s website began with a section on “Our Economy” that dodged
any commitment to take on powerful interests, parroting the corporate
Democratic line with non-committal strings of focus-group-tested
buzz-words like this: “Jon will stand up in Congress for a dynamic,
forward-looking, fiscally responsible economic policy that maximizes
opportunity for entrepreneurs, workers, and investors.”
Besides not committing Ossoff to doing anything at all, this kind of
nonsense maintains the pretense that politics can please everyone, rich
and poor, without confronting conflicting interests or power disparities
between different classes or sectors of society.
In practice, corporate Dems and Republicans alike have used this kind
of vague, non-committal language as a smoke-screen for the
concentration of more and more power and wealth in the hands of a ruling
class that is oblivious to the lives and problems of the rest of
humanity. In a televised debate with Handel, Ossoff pledged not to bite
the hand that feeds him by raising taxes on the wealthy, and came out
against universal publicly-funded healthcare.
The Ossoff fiasco illustrates the dead-end into which the DLC
Democrats have driven their party. As long as their primary goal is to
raise the money they need to run corrupt multi-million dollar campaigns,
their party can never honestly address the real concerns of the people
whose votes ultimately decide the result. Once the public finally caught
on to the corporate Democrats’ deceptive game, the Dems were bound to
reap a whirlwind of righteous popular anger.
As President Harry Truman said in a speech in 1952,
“The people don’t want a phony Democrat. If it’s a choice between a
Republican and a Republican in Democratic clothing, they’ll take the
genuine article every time.” Truman understood that betrayal and outrage
are more potent political forces than arguments about which party’s
policies are more evil than the other’s.

The Corrupt “Middle of the Road”
Because the Democratic Party has become first and foremost a
fundraising and bribery machine, the only thing that Democratic leaders
seem to have gleaned from Bernie Sanders’s success is that his
presidential campaign raised millions of dollars in small donations from
working- and middle-class people. So, corporate Democrats have latched
onto grassroots fundraising as an element of Sanders’s “political
revolution” that they can embrace – not issues such as universal
healthcare, free college tuition and a $15 minimum wage. Now they are
worried that Ossoff’s defeat may have killed that golden goose.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

What anyone without a vested interest in the Democratic Party could
have told the party bigwigs is that Bernie Sanders’s fundraising success
was not a gimmick that could be replicated in isolation from other
aspects of his campaign. It was the result of a public upsurge of
support for a refreshingly honest, independent and perennially
marginalized politician who offered concrete solutions to the real
problems of American politics and society — problems largely created,
swept under the rug and ignored for a generation by a corrupt political
establishment.
As on so many other fronts, the corporate Democrats are caught in a
trap they have set for themselves with their deceptive, monetized model
of politics.
In 2008, they fabricated a myth that Barack Obama had raised a record
share of his funding from small donors. But an apples-to-apples
comparison of official records showed that he only raised 24 percent of
his funds from donors who gave less than $200, about the same as both
Kerry and Bush in 2004.
A well-publicized study by the Campaign Finance Institute (CFI)
kept the Obama small donor myth alive by treating people who donated to
both his primary and general election campaigns as if they were two
different people, magically transforming many who gave more than $200
into twice as many smaller donors and boosting his small donor
percentage from 24 percent to 30 percent in the primary and 34 percent
in the general election in the CFI study.
Now the CFI has backtracked and cites the 24 percent figure. By contrast,
both Trump and Sanders really did raise more of their funds from small
donors – 44 percent for Sanders and 58 percent for Trump, compared with
only 22 percent for Clinton.
The real danger of the Ossoff fiasco is the same one the corporate
Democrats keep creating and recreating for their party, that their
slick, deceptive brand of politics is so tainting their identity that it
will undermine real progressive Democratic candidates in 2018 and
beyond.

After a generation of corporate politics, it is vital that both
journalists and the public learn to tell the difference between corrupt
corporate Republicans and Democrats on the one hand and genuine,
well-motivated grassroots candidates on the other. This distinction may
ultimately be more important to the political future of the country than
the choice between Republicans and Democrats, and telling the
difference does not require an advanced degree in political science. A
quick look at any candidate’s website can usually tell us most of what
we need to know.
I already contrasted Archie Parnell’s promise “to make big
corporations pay their fair share” of taxes with Jon Ossoff’s pledges to
his wealthy benefactors. Ossoff also fully embraced Ronald Reagan’s
tired old saw that the government should be “run like a business.” His
so-called “accountability plan,”
which aimed only to trim government waste, not to hold politicians
accountable to their constituents for their policies or their
corruption, included a section headed “Bringing the Government up to
Private Sector Standards,” a classic theme of pseudo-technocratic
“centrist” politicians.
Despite or maybe because of working on Capitol Hill
for five years, Ossoff didn’t seem to understand that the federal
government’s most critical responsibilities involve public services like
healthcare, education, social welfare and infrastructure, for which the
neoliberal “business” model has proved to be damaging and dangerous.
Ossoff’s political posture appeared to be calculated to position
himself directly between the progressive wing of the Democratic Party
and the Southern conservative “Blue Dogs,”
a throwback to Bill Clinton’s “triangulation” strategy from the 1990s —
even though the Blue Dogs have been reduced from 54 seats in Congress
in 2008 to 18 now.
As Texan progressive activist Jim Hightower says, “There ain’t
nothing in the middle of the road but yellow lines and dead armadillos.”
The center in “center-left” has always been a euphemism for
pro-big-business, and American voters have had 30 years to judge the
effects of this calculated, cynical kind of politics on their country
and their lives.
Americans are now divided, not so much between the deceptive pitches
of corporate Democrats and Republicans, but between desperately hoping
for a new kind of politics that honestly addresses the reality of their
lives on the one hand and giving up on “politics” altogether on the
other.Moral Bankruptcy on War and Peace
Nowhere is the moral bankruptcy of the Democratic Party more evident
than on questions of war and peace. Americans chose Obama over Clinton
in 2008 in large part based on Clinton’s vote for the Iraq War
authorization and Obama’s decision to speak at an anti-war rally in
Chicago in October 2002, in which he called the illegal planned invasion
“a dumb war.”

Saudi
King Salman bids farewell to President Barack Obama at Erga Palace
after a state visit to Saudi Arabia on Jan. 27, 2015. (Official White
House Photo by Pete Souza)

But in his book, The Audacity of Hope, Obama wrote that he
hesitated to speak at that anti-war rally because, “on the merits I
didn’t consider the case against war to be cut-and-dried.”
In fact, military-industrial power brokers like Chicago’s Crown family had
backed Obama’s political career right from the start and knew him far
better than the general public, who were meeting him for the first time
through his award-winning marketing campaign.
The Crown family were among Obama’s top national fundraising
“bundlers” in 2008 and former General Dynamics’ CEO Lester Crown, the
patriarch of the family, hosted an elite fundraiser for Obama at his
home in Chicago.
Once elected, Obama dropped more bombs and missiles
on more countries than Bush, and expanded the violence and chaos of
Bush’s “war on terror” to Libya, Syria and Yemen. Obama spent more money on weapons and war than any president since World War II (even after adjusting for inflation), and rewarded General Dynamics with a steady stream of profits from expanded production of Virginia class submarines ($2.5 billion each), 39 new Arleigh Burke destroyers to be built over 20 years ($1.8 billion each) and three new Zumwalt destroyers ($7.5 billion each, including development costs, more than an aircraft carrier).
Obama and a Democratic Congress ordered the Zumwalt destroyers in April 2009 over the objections of the Navy, which called the Zumwalt, “a ship you don’t need,” as the program had already become an operational, engineering and procurement nightmare.
Admiral Jay Johnson, the former chief of naval operations who had championed the Zumwalt program, was by then Vice Chairman, and soon to be CEO, of General Dynamics. The Zumwalt destroyers are vulnerable to modern anti-ship missiles, and the first ship launched, the USS Zumwalt, had to be towed out of the Panama Canal in December 2016 after its propellers jammed and it ran aground.
As a major supplier of bombs and ammunition,
General Dynamics has also profited handsomely from the U.S. bombing of
Iraq and Syria, which is now the heaviest U.S. bombing campaign since
the bombing of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, with over 84,000 bombs and missiles dropped since 2014.
The various Al Qaeda splinter groups tearing Syria apart have all
been armed with some share of the thousands of tons of weapons the Obama
administration and its allies flooded across Syria’s borders since
2011. These include thousands of howitzers, rocket launchers and other
heavy weapons, and over 315 million rounds of ammunition, as Gareth
Porter expertly catalogued in a recent article.
Democratic Representative Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii has introduced the “Stop Arming Terrorists Act,”
which would prohibit any further U.S. arming of Al Qaeda-linked
terrorists in Syria or anywhere else. But only 14 of her colleagues have
co-sponsored her bill and eight of them are Republicans. The six
progressive Democrats who have signed on are Welch, Lee, Conyers,
Khanna, Rush and De Fazio.

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii.

In the Senate, Chris Murphy, D-Connecticut, has taken the lead in
opposing arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the U.S.’s despicable role in
the Saudi-led war on Yemen. The bill Murphy sponsored with Senators Rand
Paul, R-Kentucky, and Al Franken, D-Minnesota, to stop a small part of
the latest Saudi arms sale failed by 53-47, thanks to five Democrats who
voted with the Republican majority: Donnelly, Manchin, McCaskill,
Nelson and Warner.
Senator Bill Nelson, from my home state of Florida, has long been known as the “Senator for Lockheed Martin.” But
it is a new low, even for Nelson, to prioritize profits from U.S. arms
sales over the dangerously precarious lives of the starving and
cholera-stricken children of Yemen.
In its markup for the 2018 national defense authorization, the House
Armed Services Committee has approved consideration of Barbara Lee’s
amendment to repeal the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force
(AUMF), the legal fig-leaf with which Pentagon and White House lawyers
still pretend to justify the rivers of blood shed in the name
of September 11th and the “global war on terror.”
Barbara Lee was the only member of Congress in either chamber with
the wisdom and courage to vote against the AUMF in 2001. How many will
stand with Barbara Lee this time to consign the AUMF to the garbage can
of history?
Predictably, neither the Ossoff nor Parnell campaigns offered any new or progressive positions on U.S. war policy. Ossoff’s website
had a long-winded statement of unconditional support for Israel, with
no mention of human rights, occupation or settlements, nor any word on
the plight of the Palestinians at all, and he threw in a threat of
destabilizing new sanctions against Iran for good measure.
This kind of blatant pandering to the Israel lobby is another cynical
staple of the DLC model of Democratic politics. Ossoff touted his five
years as a national security staffer but avoided specific policy
proposals, while Parnell’s website promised only to keep the local Air
Force base open and support military veterans.
The U.S. has been at war for over 15 years. Its wars have killed hundreds of times
the number of Americans killed on September 11th. No country destroyed
by the U.S. war machine has yet emerged from the violence and chaos
unleashed on it, making them all fertile ground for Al Qaeda and ISIS
recruiters, who flaunt their capacity to keep striking back in
surprising places, from San Bernardino and Manchester to the Philippines
and West Africa to the heart of Kabul’s fortified Green Zone.
Yet no Democratic Party leader has presented any proposal to
deescalate an increasingly global asymmetric war that keeps spreading
and spinning farther out of control. As the Trump administration looks
only to dangerous and potentially catastrophic escalation on every
front, where is the Democratic alternative?

Beyond Inverted Totalitarianism
Gabbard’s bill on Syria, Murphy’s initiatives on Yemen and Lee’s AUMF
repeal bill are all tests of whether the Democratic Party can become
relevant again to the future of our country and the world. Bernie
Sanders’s campaign got a shot in the arm when Gabbard joined him on the
campaign trail and took on the questions of war and peace that he had
timidly avoided.

A sign at a Bernie Sanders rally in Washington D.C. on June 9, 2016. (Photo credit: Chelsea Gilmour)

Sanders’s continued silence or even quiet support for U.S. war policy
is a dangerous and disturbing element in an otherwise honorable
progressive stance, and the position he has earned as America’s most
popular politician gives him both a platform and a responsibility to
address critical foreign policy issues as well as domestic ones.
Sanders would do well to have a serious discussion about foreign
policy with Jeremy Corbyn, whose progressive views and expressions
of concern for the lives of working people and their families do not
stop at the borders of his own country. Corbyn’s domestic and foreign
policy positions therefore form a coherent and consistent whole that
makes sense to the public, who keep rallying around him despite regular
predictions of catastrophic defeat by both his Tory opponents and
Margaret Thatcher’s pride and joy, the New Labour/Blairite wing of his
own party.
In his 2006 book, Democracy Incorporated,
Sheldon Wolin described our present neoliberal political and economic
system as “inverted totalitarianism,” differing from classical
totalitarianism in that, instead of just abolishing the tools of
democracy, our rulers have coopted them to use for their own purposes.
Wolin observed that the inverted form of totalitarianism seems to be a
more palatable and therefore sustainable way to concentrate wealth and
power in the hands of a privileged ruling class than the classical
totalitarianism of the Twentieth Century.
But the genius of inverted totalitarianism is also its weakness. As
long as the institutions of democracy still exist, even in their present
hollowed-out and corrupted form, the wealthy and powerful face the
danger that the public will one day discover its voice and its power,
stop voting for corporate-backed celebrity politicians like Donald Trump
and Hillary Clinton, and develop a “new kind of politics”
that offers real solutions to our most serious problems, from poverty,
inequality and for-profit healthcare to war, terrorism and climate
change.
The refusal of the Blairites and Clintonistas to see the writing on
the wall for their 1990s brand of politics is costing the people of the
U.K, the U.S. and the world very dearly. But the sleeping giant of
democracy is stirring beneath the astro-turf of the American dream.
The Sanders and Corbyn campaigns, Podemos in Spain and connected
movements around the world may be the first green shoots of a just,
peaceful and sustainable future — but only if we recognize that it is up
to all of us to both nurture them and hold their leaders accountable on
the critical questions of our time.

Nicolas J S Davies is the author of Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.
He also wrote the chapters on “Obama at War” in Grading the 44th
President: a Report Card on Barack Obama’s First Term as a Progressive
Leader.

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The Real Reason Behind Push for Standardized Tests: It's All About the Adults

On standardized testing in our schools

A must read article about the standardized test industry.Written by an insider who has worked as a test scorer, the article outlines a multinational industry based on an army of temporary workers paid by the piece at $0.30 to $0.70 per test, translated in the need to grade 40 tests per hour to make a $12 salary. The article goes on to show how the companies gauge the grading "results" based on the need to ensure new contracts to continue profiting off of our youth. The original article is from Monthly Review. Here it is on Schools Matter blog.

From Sharon Higgins

Parallels between America today and Germany in the 1920's and early 30's

"Resentment and obstruction are all the right wing in America have to peddle. Their policies are utterly discredited. Their ideology - even by its own standards - is a sham. They are so bereft of leaders, their de facto leader is a former drug addicted, thrice-divorced radio talk show host. That is literally the best they can muster. But they have built a national franchise inciting the downwardly mobile to blame the government, not the right, for their problems, exactly as Hitler did in the 1920s."

Chicago View of Unity/UFT on Charters

After many meetings and debates, the Chicago delegation succeeded in working with the New York United Federation of Teachers, Local 2 (UFT) to push the AFT to take stronger stands on charter school accountability and school closings — though many delegates from Chicago would have liked the language to have been even stronger.

Generally speaking, the New York delegation represented organizing charters as the best model for handling their role in reshaping unions, despite the fact that according to many reports few charter schools in New York have been organized as is the case in Chicago. This logic is the same touted by the Progressive Caucus of the AFT. The few that have been organized are a part of the UFT local though they have separate contracts negotiated with the help of UFT. The Chicago delegation reflection the mindset that allowing new charters to continue to proliferate while attempting to organize existing charters is an end game in which public schools and the union lose.

Ed Notes Greatest Hits: HSA Rally and Founding of GEM

Angel Gonzalez and I attended that rally and used the footage to promote our conference on Mar. 28, 2009, which is where the concept of a group like GEM emerged. Until then we had basically been a committee of ICE working with the NYCORE high stakes testing group. The actions of Eva and crew helped spawn GEM. Mommie Dearest!!

I have more video somewhere. I was hoping to get Leni Riefenstahl to edit it but she died. We would have called it "Triumph of the Hedge Fund Operators."

Video of Chicago's George Schmidt and CORE Shredding Arne Duncan and the Chicago Corporate Model

Great Post on Teacher Quality at the Morton School

I'm very tired of the myth that schools are bursting at the seams with apathetic, unskilled, surly, child-hating losers who can't get jobs doing anything else. I recently figured that, counting high school and college where one encounters many teachers in the course of a year, I had well over 100 teachers in my lifetime, and I can only say that one or two truly had no place being in a classroom.